Where the F*** Are We?
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What mystery of navigation did the world's greatest minds struggle with?
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's an archipelago in the far west of the UK. And I mean far west. Like, once you think you're in the west, like around Cornwall, keep going. And then take a ferry another three hours west, and you'll find yourself in a collection of islands called the Isles of Scilly.
That's Scilly spelled S-C-I-L-L-Y, not silly ha-ha.
That's 99PI producer Kelly Prime.
In fact, silly is not haha at all. It's a place that's hard to wrap your mind around. The islands sit in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, so you'll find tropical plants like giant palms and birds of paradise all blooming up against the backdrop of the rugged North Atlantic.
It's also historically one of the deadliest places in the UK to travel by sea.
These islands are plopped down in churning waters with jagged rocks rising all around like the jaws of some sort of mythical sea creature. In this past October, I found myself on a little boat called the Buccaneer right in the middle of it.
It's crazy, man.
Why are the Isles of Scilly significant in maritime history?
It's a crazy place. There's just rocks everywhere. As you're going along, you don't realize we're passing rocks under the water all the time.
The buccaneer belongs to a scuba diver named Todd Stevens. Todd has been diving the shipwrecks around Sili for over two decades.
If you're into shipwrecks, it's really hard not to find one here. At least 900 shipwrecks litter the coasts of Sili, probably more. Sometimes ships will sink on top of other older shipwrecks, so it's difficult to say for sure.
Are there shipwrecks below us right now?
Yeah, yeah, we've passed quite a few. If you'd have been asking me that as we were just coming along Samaria shoreline, there's at least half a dozen along there.
Oh, my God.
Are there life jackets on this boat? We were specifically looking for the remains of one particular disaster, where not one but four ships were lost on the same night. The HMS Association, Romney, Eagle, and Firebrand.
And we're just coming up on the firebrand now. So we're right over it now. The wreck lays just across here. And her bows are up that way because her anchors are up that end. And then she lays across here.
The wrecks happened on October 22nd, 1707. It was quite literally a dark and stormy night, and there was a fleet of British naval ships bravely led by an admiral named Cloudsley Shovel.
Shovel and his fleet had just fought a battle with the French. They were headed back, and according to their maps, they were about to pass safely into the English Channel. But in reality, they were actually 200 miles off course, exactly where you really do not want to be, smack in the middle of the Isles of Scilly.
The HMS Association crashed into one of the many jagged rocks just beneath the surface of the water. The death toll was somewhere between 1,400 and 2,000. It was, at the time, the deadliest shipwreck in British history.
But the important thing about this shipwreck, why it's still remembered today, isn't just the scale of the disaster. It's also why it happened and how it could have been avoided. Because the navigators of the fleet were missing a vital piece of information. And do we know why they thought they were that far?
Yeah, well, they didn't know the longitude, so they're guessing.
The reason this fleet was so dangerously off course was because they didn't know their longitude, their east-west coordinates.
And this wasn't because they lost their map or their navigator was killed by pirates or they were just really bad at their jobs. They didn't know their longitude because at that point, no one knew how to calculate longitude at sea.
It was a problem that had plagued navigators and scientists for centuries. The greatest minds of Europe, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and the Halley's Comet guy, they all tried and failed to find a way to calculate longitude at sea. Most people thought it simply wasn't possible.
That is until the 18th century, when the disaster in Scilly helped inspire Britain to action.
What led to the deadliest shipwreck in British history?
What follows is a tale of imperial greed, a lucrative contest, and an obsessive underdog who became his own worst enemy.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What mystery of navigation did the world's greatest minds struggle with?
0:00–1:16
2
Why are the Isles of Scilly significant in maritime history?
1:16–4:40
3
What led to the deadliest shipwreck in British history?
4:40–21:49
4
How did the longitude problem challenge navigators for centuries?
21:49–47:07